Since the advent of AI, content creators, media conglomerates, and professional writers have complained that AI companies are using their own copyrighted material to train their AI models. Speaking of which, you may have heard that the New York Times sued OpenAI for allegedly using the publication’s articles to train an AI model. Honestly, there are many such incidents, but the most recent one involves Snapchat. A group of YouTubers who have sued multiple companies for scraping their videos to train AI models are now suing Snap for the same reasons.
YouTubers’ lawsuit accuses Snap of training an AI model that powers one of Snapchat’s features
News comes to you via tech crunchreports that in a new lawsuit, a group of YouTubers claim that Snap used their videos to train a model that powers its “Imagine Lens” feature. For those who don’t know, this feature allows Snapchat users to change their images using text prompts. Notably, the lawsuit was reportedly filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California.
According to the complaint, Snap used large video and language datasets such as HD-VILA-100M. A group of YouTubers claims that these datasets are only available for academic or research purposes. In the lawsuit, the YouTubers also added that Snap circumvented YouTube’s technical safeguards, terms of service, and licensing rules. For those who don’t know, all of these policies explicitly restrict commercial use.
So, you may be wondering what the YouTubers are seeking in the Snap lawsuit? They are seeking statutory damages and a permanent injunction to prevent further claims of copyright infringement. As reported, the creators behind the popular works are h3h3 A YouTube channel is leading this lawsuit. Plus, small creators of YouTube channels. mr short game golf and golfaholic have also participated.
This is not the first time that copyright infringement has occurred.
As mentioned above, this isn’t the first time a YouTuber has filed a lawsuit against a tech company like Snap. There are reportedly 70 copyright infringement lawsuits filed against AI companies, according to data from the nonprofit Copyright Alliance. It’s worth noting that the same YouTuber has filed lawsuits against major AI giants like NVIDIA and Meta for similar reasons. It will be interesting to see the outcome of this case, given that courts have ruled in favor of technology companies in many cases.
